Mike Lynch at Nannygoat Hill on #artwiculate’s artificial intelligence

I already read Twitter on the toilet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not tempted to give Shitter a go.

Much ado about LADYES ! Ladyes ladyes LADYES !

Megan Amram’s Shakespearean spam.

An example of the kind of thing where I think Twitter has the edge over Google+ or Facebook: it gives rise to demented brilliance like #FutureSeinfeld. Some great work from @spikelynch, @facelikethunder, @timsterne and @monkeytypist among many others.

I’ve seen a lot of people link to Nicholas Carr’s call for publishers to bundle free, electronic versions of books with purchases of the physical artifact (in the way that music labels often bundle audio files with vinyl purchases), but it chimes so much with my own feelings that I felt I needed to link to it here too.

Every writer is two people (at least). There’s the one that does the writing, and the one that has an egg for breakfast. I’m the other one.

Margaret Atwood on the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, quoted in the New York Times in the context of authors extending their private selves into the world via social media.

Sam Anderson in the New York Times discussing inform­ation overload, James Gleick’s new book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and the overwhelming inclus­iveness of the internet on one hand and the restraint of the tradi­tional almanac on the other:

Like the Web, the almanac aspires to be a total inform­ation delivery system – the source of every datum you will ever need. Unlike the Web, however, the almanac aims for exhaust­iveness within clearly defined limits. It has a front cover and a back cover. Compared with the Internet, it feels wonder­fully contained and stable – it is curated omniscience, portion-control Google. Much of its value comes from the empty spaces around its edges, the missing entries in its index, the silence that descends when you close it.

Do I wish (Don) DeLillo was on Twitter? No, that would be grotesque: the worst thing that could ever happen to my relationship with his books.

Boxer, Beetle author Ned Beauman in an interview with Ideas Tap. I agree with this in part: writers who trade in a sort of aloof authorial demeanour or carefully-constructed mystique will not be partic­u­larly well suited to broad­casting or inter­acting on Twitter. On the other hand, Margaret Atwood — a writer one could hardly accuse of being frivolous — appar­ently enjoys a certain repartee with her Twitter followers.

As for the question of Twitter’s impact on productivity, you can no more expect to get any writing done if you’ve got Twitter open than you would if you set up a typewriter in a middle of a party. But few sensible people would advocate that one should never go to parties.

I hope none of the above reads as though I’m being dismissive of Beauman (from the evidence of Boxer, Beetle he is an excep­tional writer) — or that I’m being precious or defensive about Twitter, for that matter.

Canada’s National Post is running excerpts from Finding The Words, a new book of essays on writing — including a fantastic piece by historical and fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay on ‘authors in cyber­space’ and the consequent ‘disap­pearance of the space between author and consumer and between author and work’.

The piece goes beyond talking just about authors, though, and looks at the accel­er­ating phenomenon of ‘self-exposure’. As Gavriel Kay says: “privacy as a value becomes eroded, or super­seded by exposure as a value.” (Link via Jonathan Strahan, via James Bradley.)

The Read It Later blog analyses online reading patterns, specifically the times during the day when readers bookmark content for reading later, and the times at which they eventually get to the items on their reading list. Nothing startling in the results, except that it’s inter­esting to see how the patterns of reading on the iPhone and iPad (Read It Later is an iOS app, and it’s from this app that the data has been collected) resemble what I imagine are typical patterns for reading the newspaper: over breakfast, during the commute, on the couch after dinner.

I don’t use Read It Later, but I do use Instapaper, and I have a subscription in Google Reader for unread Instapaper items. I ‘star’ these unread Instapaper items in Google Reader during the day, assem­bling a kind of person­alised newspaper for the moments later in the day when I’ll have a chance to read them. In a way, I’m the editor of my own newspaper, and the bloggers I follow and the people I interact with on Twitter are my reporters.

Every now and then I plan to shout “Great Caesar’s ghost!” at you all, just like a real newspaper editor.

(Blogging) encourages explor­ation and exper­i­ment­ation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.

On the contrary, a book is the culmin­ation of this writing: it’s what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together.

The ever astute and ever linkworthy Mandy Brown on how we might distin­guish blogs and books when comes the time that the world wide web is the native, natural home of the book.

Laura Miller surveys the role of the internet in recent contem­porary (English-language) fiction, especially its power to emphasise character (and character flaws).

It is what the internet lures out of us – hubris, daydreams, avarice, obses­sions – that makes it so potent and so volatile… the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it.

Mandy Brown on building things to last, on being digital caretakers, and on archiving our digital cultural memory.

Bronwyn van der Merwe from the BBC online and technology team runs through some of the choices involved in creating a new ‘global visual language’ for the corporation’s digital services. (Also worth a look is the BBC internet team’s post on regen­er­ating the Doctor Who section of the site for the launch of the new series. If only the video content was available outside of the UK.)

I do appre­ciate the irony that by sharing this article on inform­ation overload I am directly contrib­uting to your inform­ation overload.